What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

First, I headed to ChatGPT to pipe in my top 5 artists (as noted by Spotify). These may not really be my top 5, but I obviously listen to them a lot :).

Me: Spotify lists my top 5 most listened to artists as Greta Van Fleet, Mott The Hoople, Television, Steely Dan, and The Kinks. can you recommend 10 more artists you think I'll like?

ChatGPT: Based on your taste, you might enjoy Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, Cream, The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eagles, Jethro Tull, The Doors, and Deep Purple. Give them a listen and see if they resonate with your musical preferences!

Me: Can you recommend some lessor known artists you think I'll enjoy?

ChatGPT: Certainly! Explore the source of The Black Angels, Rival Sons, Ty Segall, Temples, The Sheepdogs, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Khruangbin, Parquet Courts, Dr. Dog, and Allah-Las. These lesser-known gems might align well with your musical taste.

I've actually never heard or listened to any of these artists! Next, I listened to each artist's most popular songs. Here's my take:

The Black Angels: Listened to Young Men Dead and Black Grease. Both are really good songs. Definitely right up my alley. Added to my playlist.

Rival Sons: Listened to Do Your Worst and Open My Eyes. Really liking this artist and added to my playlist.

Ty Segall: Listened to My Lady's On Fire and My Room. On the fence, there's something here that I like. Continued to listen through to Every 1's a Winner, Feel, Girlfriend, Void, Eggman, and Tall Man Skinny Lady. I think Void and Eggman sealed the deal for me. This is definitely an artist I'll listen to. Really enjoyed some of the interesting, and unexpected, things that happened musically in these songs.

Temples: Listened to Shelter Song and Paraphaernalia. Not feeling it here.

The Sheepdogs: Listened to Feeling Good and I Don't Know - EP Version. On the fence, but it's not bad. Continued to listen to Please Don't Lead Me On and Nobody. Added to the playlist at this point. This artist has a Lynyrd Skynyrd vibe that I like.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard: Listened to Gila Monster. Really enjoyed the musical composition, but the voices just aren't for me. I've never been a fan of this voice style and then the chanting of "Gila Gila" really isn't my thing. I decided to listen to more anyway and was suprised to hear vastly different styles with Work This Time, Sense, Slow Jam 1, and Theia. Still not going on my playlist, but some interesting tunes from this artist.

Khruangbin: Listened to Texas Sun, People Everywhere (Still Alive), Mariella, White Gloves, and B-Side. Love the mix of RnB and funk. Some really good grooves happening here. B-Side had me moving in my seat and this artist will definitely be on the playlist.

Parquet Courts: Listened to Tenderness, skipped Total Football due to the explicit tag and my preferences around that, and then continued listening to Outside, and Careers in Combat. I am a fan of this genre of music, but I am very particular in what I like and what I don't. I love The Dead Milkmen, Ramones, Television, and Dead Kennedys. This artist isn't giving me the feels.

Dr. Dog: Listened to Where'd All the Time Go, Nellie, Heart it Races - Cover Version, and The Breeze. During the first song, I knew this artist was going on the playlist. Got to Nellie and there was absolutely no doubt. Love the voices, the simple melodies, and the entire vibe.

Allah-Las: Listened to Houston, Caramaran, and Raspberry Jam. Really like the organ in this and it takes me back to The Doors, Steppenwolf, and The Animals. Both Houston and Raspberry Jam were instrumentals, and I wanted to hear more vocals, so I listened to Dust as well. This is some good music and is going on the playlist.

Overall, ChatGPT did a great job of recommending music that is now on my playlist. I'm desperately waiting for the day that I can have a conversation with my personal assistant, have it queue up music for me automatically, and then I give it feedback on what I heard. My personal assistant would then continue to shape my playlist based on my feedback. I know this day is coming soon, but it can't get here fast enough for me.

As a bonus, after I conducted this experiment Spotify immediately jumped into another artist I never heard of -- Drug Cabin. The first song played was Steely Dad and this is just a fantastic song.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like judiciary, henry kissinger and popcorn. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was taking notes.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!

Good morning ~ This is a thread to discuss new album releases that have arrived on our doorstep this week. Feel free to share albums and EPs that have caught your eye and interest.

Discussion Points

What are you looking forward to listen to?
Have you listened to any of these releases?
What are your thoughts?
What have you enjoyed from these artists in the past?

Why Friday?

Most (but not all) new LPs/EPs release on a Friday, as labels want to give the release a full week of sales before entering the charts.

~~ Feedback on the format welcome

Hello tabletop community,

I am designing my first ever boss fight, meant to really challenge my players. I don't want to kill any of them off since we're all new and it feels weird to lose a character, but I also want it to feel threatening. I could use some advice about how to execute this situation:

Boss is a big mimic disguised as a blood fountain with 6 long tentacle arms, each of which will be it's own figure on the board that can be up to 3 tiles from the 3x3 mimic figure.

Four of the tentacles have weapons that can deal 2d6 damage and have 30hp AC11 (roughly making it in line with a Brown Bear for threat and HP). They can grapple (squeeze the target) instead for 1d8 damage per turn, escapable on DC13 strength.

Two of the tentacles have shield-like hard points that defend neighboring enemies by giving disadvantage on attack rolls against them. AC14 HP30. I couldn't find anything to base these on for an encounter designer app.

Main body has low movement (10ft), and has 200hp AC19, and loses 20hp per tentacle lost. It has a bite attack +6 to hit 2d8. It also floods blood through sections of the room, forcing player movement and dealing 2d8 poison damage. I based it on a Roper for difficulty and attacks.

I think this combination creature would provide a very interesting and movement focused fight, but I'm very new to DM'ing and I'm afraid of accidentally killing the players.

My questions are: (1) How do I avoid accidentally killing everyone? (2) Is this fight too hard for a newbie group of 5 new players? (3) Any other cool ideas I didn't think of?

The whole narcissism/NPD thing gets talked about so much these days. I don't know if my father has that. But he no doubt has many of those qualities as he is extremely self absorbed, has been neglectful throughout my life, and is incapable of looking inwards.

There's a lot of back story but hopefully it's enough to say that I have had a strained relationship to my father since I came out as a transgender woman 5 years ago. Everyone else are able to use my new name and gender me correctly, like nobody ever makes a mistake anymore (and mistakes are okay in the beginning because it's new and confusing for everyone). But he continuously says the wrong thing and at times also does it on purpose if he's angry with me for whatever reason.

So the last time I saw him was 3 months ago for a day of golfing with him and my brother, where the first few words he said to me outside of hello was calling me "drengerøv" - literally "boyass". The closest word in English is probably something like boy scout, asshole, or a gendered version of smart-ass. He wanted to get back at me for saying "hi old man" which I feel is a pretty normal thing to say to one's father and also he is 75 years old? But sure, maybe it was cheeky of me. I can see that. So I would have laughed if he called me a bitch or something. But his response was the final drop in the bucket for me because this is after so many conversations about deadnaming and misgendering these last several years. Months do pass without error, but then something like this happens out of the blue time and time again. For those of you who are also transgender, you know how traumatizing it can be. I have nightmares about him.

So anyway the reason for my need to rant here is that three weeks ago, he texted that he wanted to come visit me, but I wrote back that I don't want to see him on account of how it went last time. He didn't reply until now, and I am just kind of in disbelief about how much of a non-apology it is. And it brings me back to the narcissism thing and something called DARVO: deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. He is always the victim no matter what. If he deadnamed or misgendered me in the past, it is always "well I was tired," or "I am very stressed," never an actual apology. And sure enough, this time it isn't either - he actually did use the word apologize a couple of times, but it felt like it was in the context of him feeling bad and being depressed about it rather than truly sorry.

He for example wrote "I spoke to my psychologist and he fully understands that I feel like shit about being rejected by you" and "I am so nervous and afraid of doing the wrong thing again".

Do you notice how it's all about him? Blaming me for rejecting him? How terrible and awful it is for him? In the words of Emily Blunt... You don't get to commit sin, and then ask all of us to feel sorry for you when there are consequences. I just don't fucking care. I'm done feeling sorry for the man who is supposed to be a father figure. Trying to make me feel bad about his fuckups is just... ugh.

And knowing him, he probably wasn't honest with his psychologist about the situation in the first place because he always engineers situations to make himself look good. Even at his brother's funeral, my uncle, his speech was about being the boss of a hundred people in a company back in the day while kind of making fun of how silly it was that my uncle was a communist. My father is just completely incapable of being honest with himself and truly reflect about his behavior. These are all the same reasons my mom divorced him 10+ years ago, feeling very neglected by him. Even this he managed to years later turn on its head and refer to as "the time your mother failed me", like it is just ironic how he always does this and also unbelievable that he cannot himself realize it.

So I think I'm pretty much done at this point. I almost always have to take the high road while he just continues to do his own thing without much of a care in the world until the consequences finally catch up with him. Everything about my relationship with him the last 5 years has been awful. Even if I wasn't queer, he still wouldn't truly care about me - anytime we've had lunch or something, we only ever talk about him. He would only ask how I was doing to be polite. It got to the point that if we talked on the phone, I would time how long it took for him to start talking about himself and it was rarely more than half a minute. One time, I didn't even manage to answer, like he didn't even pause after asking the question before going on to talk about his own shit.

Another great example of this idiocy is when I woke up from anesthesia earlier this year after having triple jaw surgery. One of the first things he tried to talk about was how lucky he was that he found a good parking spot while I was literally in the middle of throwing up blood. I had tears in my eyes and my stomach was convulsing and I looked probably the worst he's ever seen me, and yet all he does is wrinkle his nose in disgust, turn to my mom (who, being sane, of course completely ignored him) and smiling while bragging about something as mundane as parking. Who does that? What the fuck!?

I have been typing for more than an hour at this point so it's probably unhealthy to continue lol, sorry, and thank you for reading my rambling if you actually made it this far.

So, last night I undertook some surgery, and replaced the motherboard and processor in my old gaming rig with a slightly upgraded combo so that I can squeak in under the minimum specs for Star Citizen. After the bootup, windows started telling me that my copy was no longer licensed.

Now, I had used the free upgrade from win 7 Pro, and as such had a win 10 pro install for the last 3 years or so. All above board. Now, the system is telling me I only have a win 10 home license showing on the system, and that I need to install home to use it.

Why would this happen, and how can I get my win 10 pro license back in good standing on the new hardware? Again, only the motherboard and processor have changed...

EDIT

I ended up purchasing a new license from StackSocial as suggested by pseudolobster below, and the issue is now resolved. Thanks to everyone for all the helpful responses!

I received a quote from a local contractor to do some home remodeling. Some of the numbers make sense, but some seem quite high. Like, I can't believe it costs $3k in labor to install an electric fireplace insert, or an island hood. Anybody have any insight they're willing to share on this quote?

Remodel estimate

1. Planning and asbestos test $1,190.00
2. Move range outlet $1,514.00
3. Island hood $4,498.00
4. Electric fireplace insert $4,133.00
5. Main bathroom $36,552.00
6. Hall bathroom toilet and fan with humidistat $3,579.00
7. Concrete landings outside the front and back doors, front siding flashing $2,899.00
8. Re-pipe plumbing $14,993.00
9. Bedroom window glass replacement $749.00
   Total $70,107.00

Description
Plans will be refined. Drywall will be tested for asbestos content.
Dust will be contained and floors will be protected.
The range outlet will be moved.
An island range hood will be installed. The placeholder hood in the estimate is a Zephyr Brisas.
An electric fireplace insert will be installed. The placeholder fireplace in the estimate is a
Dimplex 500001756.
The main bathroom will be remodeled. The shower will be replaced with a pre-formed shower
pan and Corian walls, and two shower valves and shower heads will be installed. A sliding
shower door will be installed. The floor will be tiled. A new vanity cabinet, countertop, sink, and
faucet will be installed. A new toilet will be installed. The vanity electrical outlets will be
lowered, a larger lower mirror will be installed, a new vanity light will be installed. A ventilation
fan and light will be installed with a humidistat/condensation sensor. Drywall will be patched.
New baseboard trim will be installed. The bathroom will be painted.
The hall bathroom toilet will be replaced. A ventilation fan with a humidistat will be installed.
Concrete landings will be poured outside the front door and outside the back sliding door. The
front door landing will be about 5-1/2’x4’ with a curved corner. The back landing will be about
3-1/2’x3’.
The plumbing in the house will be replaced. Drywall holes from installation will be patched and
painted.
Window glass will be replaced in the bedroom with the broken window pane.
Everything will be cleaned up.
All labor and materials are included.

Thank you!

I guess this is just a thing I like to do lol. I got an OLED Steam Deck and have been playing around with it for about a week, so I wanted to share what all I got.

TL;DR: OLED is the definitive version of this product. If you're at all interested, whether or not budget is a concern this model is worth looking at, especially if you can actually get your hands on one to try for a bit. Words aren't quite what they need to be to get across how it looks and feels.

The long of it:

Valve wasn't kidding about stuff like a little performance improvement and better battery life. It feels like someone took the LCD deck and made a checklist of every single thing that could be improved, and then did it. The result is just about the best refresh of a product I've ever seen.

The screen is the most obvious upgrade and it really is great to look at. It is a big jump to go from an LCD at 60hz, to OLED at 90hz with HDR available. As great as VibrantDeck is, no amount of color fuckery can really reproduce what is happening when you have these features. For games that support HDR, it can feel like you've actually made an upgrade, because of how differently it can handle things like bright flashes of light and particle effects on top of the color differences. The refresh rate is tied to the frame limiter by default, so when you drop the frame limit the refresh rate tends to stay double whatever that is. 40fps/80hz feels better than 40/40 to me, like stuttering just isn't as bothersome.

Be aware it's on developers to implement HDR, which means sometimes you run into a game with a shitty implementation. FFVII R comes to mind. Just know that if you run across a game where this feature seems to make the game look terrible, it's not the device doing it.

The improvements to the battery do mean something like a ~40% increase. Games like Armored Core VI and Elden Ring tended to last about 1.5-2 hours on the LCD model, on OLED it's more like 2.5-3, and this is the sweet spot imo. Rare that I'm gonna sit down and play for that long in the first place, so having this much power available means being able to play here and there with much less concern. Games that already played well in a low power state just get that much more time. One thing to know if you're coming from an LCD - it doesn't save your power profiles. Input profiles yes (if you saved them), but power settings need to be redone game-to-game.

The device itself is a little lighter, and it feels like it sits in my hands a little better. The difference is minute, but noticeable, and nice. All of the buttons feel good, the sticks have slightly more resistance to them, and the trackpads are much nicer to use. In particular, the way you click the trackpads is more forgiving by default, so while it is a little easier to mis-click it feels more like using a "real" trackpad. The deck in general is the only device I find doesn't really aggravate my carpal tunnel, and the OLED model keeps that up.

On the software side there isn't really a difference - SteamOS is more or less exactly the same with a few OLED-specific settings. Most of your info gets saved and loaded up when you log in. Cloud saves are one piece of course, but too, any controller profiles you saved will come back, and the SD card can just be freely transferred/there isn't really any setup to it. From boot to play I mostly just waited on the game to download - setting up the device was as simple as waiting for it to do an update, then log in, and that's it. It doesn't pester you to register for anything/no ads.

Things like sleep/wake and transitioning to desktop mode are faster and more consistent. Pretty regularly, my LCD model would fail to sleep/wake correctly - I'd put it to sleep and upon waking it, it would reboot. Inconsistent but often enough to get annoyed with. With the OLED model, i notice this doesn't happen as often. It still does, but much less frequently. The improvements to the trackpads means I use desktop mode more often, it feels much nicer to navigate. All of the stuff I had before was simple to install and restore - emudeck, decky, cryoutilities all installed without any issues and worked fine after I moved over all my stuff from the first deck. Haven't hit any issues with decky plugins either.

Even the carrying case got a pass. It's been redesigned a little, with an extra velcro fastener bit and tighter mold inside, black instead of white.

Transferring my information was about as easy as you could do. There are several options - I mostly used KDE connect, but there's also Warpinator, and a deck plugin called DeckMTP that can let you do a direct USB connection. Literally just copy/paste, once I installed all the stuff I had before I could just drop in the old device's things and be good to go. One thing to be aware of, is that for games which don't support Steam Cloud, you need to copy their save data over. That's gonna mostly be in a folder in /steamapps called CompatData. Takes a little doing but it's not hard to figure out. The hardest thing to set up was STALKER Anomaly, and all that was was about a five step process of clicking things in Wine. By the way, if you make a custom controller profile for a non-steam game, when you add that game to the library make sure it has the same name as before and your controller profile will be saved!

Overall I'm impressed to the point I intend to hold off buying any more PC hardware until a Deck 2 appears. If that product gets the same kind of attention this one did there's no doubt in my mind it will be fantastic. Considering too, the ability to dock and use peripherals, I think I'd feel safe recommending an OLED steam deck as a replacement for a gaming machine + non-work computer to just about anybody. $399 as a base price for PC Gaming is fucking awesome, and $549 for this improved model, at least I feel is very much worth it. $150 for an OLED screen, more storage, bigger battery is not bad. The deck is a hugely popular product, which means you get the added benefit of folks constantly tinkering and messing with stuff to make it work, on top of the odd developer specifically targeting it (such as in Cyberpunk, or how Bannerlord reworked its control scheme). Those kinds of communities exist around other devices, but not nearly to the same extent, and they'll die fast as those products come and go.

So that's what I got. I hope this was informative and helpful. If you have any questions I'm happy to answer as best I can. I'm super happy with the deck as a product, it feels a lot like getting to see what it looks like when someone goes the distance and throws their full weight behind this kind of product.

Edit: I don't know how well this will come through looking on different screens, but here are a few screenshots from AC VI and Morrowind that made use of HDR. Even if it doesn't come through - if you've never owned a deck and were considering one, yeah stuff can look this good on it! It's amazing.

I recently started having an issue on my windows machine with folder permissions. The start menu folder suddenly became inaccessible to any program that tried to create a shortcut there. I worked around it by just taking ownership.

Now I'm facing a much worse problem where many operations that require admin elevation suddenly doesn't work even after a UAC prompt. This has really become a problem now that I want to install wsl on this machine. Running wsl --install just returns the wsl usage info and wsl --update throws a UAC prompt, but fails saying "The requested operation requires elevation" even while logged into the built in Administrator windows account.

Normal programs can still use admin elevation (mostly), but everything that windows prompts for behaves as if I'm a regular user despite still giving and accepting a UAC prompt. The Microsoft Store has also seemingly lost the ability to update or repair itself also so that's probably related.

I've tried all the usual stuff with /DISM, /sfc, every Microsoft troubleshooter. They found no issues. Creating a new admin account lets me create the account but then it inherits the same issues. I can't even gain admin elevation in safe mode. I'm really at a loss. I don't want to have to do a system refresh because it takes so much time to get set back up, but at this point I don't know what else to do.

Has anyone else ever encountered an issue like this? I've tried searching for this and just end up on a bunch of identical 'help' pages telling me to right click -> run as admin or the generic Microsoft employee pointing me to reinstall again.

Windows version 10.0.19045 Build 19045 in case that matters

Edit: I never did find a solid reason why this was happening. It wasn't my university Maya account. While reinstalling windows on a freshly formatted drive I kept getting errors that eventually led me to discoving my ram was going bad. Got it replaced and installed windows just fine. I have to assume the problem started because of memory errors. Thanks for the suggestions everyone.